sdk77

I'm in China and streaming youtube videos is mostly out of the question, due to the very unpredictable and usually too slow nature of connectivity (I gave up on VPN long time ago and use a number of strategically placed cheap virtual servers). Over the years, youtube-dl has been a godsend. I ssh into one of my servers, download the video and then rsync it over to my laptop. Most of the time I don't really need to have the video stored locally - if I was at home I'd just stream it again - but for some niche applications like mine it's next to nothing. The buffering built in to youtube itself too often just stops or throws me into 'an error has occurred'.

Capitalism can't be communism because one is a financial / economical system and the other is a political system. The two are related but not always in the same way. European countries, especially the Scandinavian ones are very Socialist and capitalist. China is an even 'weirder' example. There already are many different forms of capitalism as an economic system under different political systems.

It's still popular in Holland and accessible via internet as well (http://nos.nl/teletekst).

I've been thinking about a sort of 'internet magazine' broadcast on old analog TV channels using a mechanism similar to how teletext works: a continuous stream of pages where more popular pages occur more frequently in the stream to reduce waiting time. The infrastructure looks very simple. Instead of RF, what about visible light? It's still possible for users to interact more closely by including slots with data directed for single users in the stream, with upstream via mobile data or wifi.

"Visiting moo shows us a curious image of a cow."

That image isn't so curious. Try 'apt-get moo' on any debian based box.

Actually, after first getting to really know gin at 37, I did some research and found this great article: http://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Mothers-Ruin/

Introducing me to the works of William Hogarth (see linked article). I was very surprised that it actually was the Dutch that introduced gin in the UK ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin ). Funny, I like gin more than I like 'our own' 'jenever'. It's a great drink, neat or otherwise. I understand how this could have caused all this mayhem way back.

>It's hard to imagine why the U.S. ever had a single lead water pipe, let alone huge numbers of them.

I always supposed that that's where the word 'plumber' came from, or 'loodgieter' (lead caster, Dutch). Both words strongly refer to lead. Growing up in Holland in the early 80's our house had lead pipes. When I bought my first house in 2003 it too still had a lead water main. I drank a lot of that water, tap water over here has the same purity (basically actually is the same) as mineral water, with no side effects.

I watched the videos and those are absolutely amazing. Ordered a PO-20 'Arcade' unit. Can't wait to start playing with it.

Nice, I will give it a try. I've installed templeOS in a VM before and played around with it. I really like the concept of a graphical console, being able to literally put images right into source code and the C++ like shell that uses some kind of JIT compiler, it's different, and interesting.

I did a quick search on google patents: https://www.google.com/patents/US9084035 - it uses a combination of AC and DC methods.

In my opinion as an EE there would be some reasonably reliable ways to detect either a line or headphone connection. Headphone impedances are typically between 16 and 600 Ohms, and line impedance is typically in the 10's of kOhm range. That's one way to differentiate. There has to be an output signal (presumably audio) first, however. Another way is to apply a very small DC current (that would certainly not damage headphones, so I would guess in the micro-ampere range) and check if there is continuity or measure the DC resistance of the load outright. For line inputs, as they're usually AC-coupled, DC resistance would be infinite, and for (DC coupled) headphones it is very low. It's an interesting subject and I wouldn't be surprised if there are some patents involved.

The style of the article reminds me of my all-time favorite book about DSP, by Richard G Lyons: http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Digital-Signal-Processin...

It's normal. Actually the part mentioned that wraps around the power supply is not only a heatsink but also a shield for reducing radiated noise. PSU like this are very noisy and without (a.o.) this shield it may not be possible to get it approbated. The shield has transparent plastic foil beneath it to act as an insulator (barely visible on the first photo, but on the picture with the shield removed it's clearly visible). The usage of yellow tape is perfectly normal.